"Unfair" Surprise

In the marbled corridor off the pressroom one morning last week, newsmen surrounded blocky Frank Gordon, the assistant U.S. attorney. For 9 1/2 days in Manhattan's federal court, Witness Louis Budenz, the backslid Red, had made out the case against eleven top U.S. Communists charged with conspiring to advocate forcible overthrow of the U.S. Government. Now, the reporters asked, who would the prosecution's next witness be?

Good-naturedly, Gordon fended off questions, held himself to one sententious answer: "All I can tell you is that it's going to be a man." The reason for this strategic evasion was soon understandable: the Government was ready with a real surprise.

When young (33), studious-looking Herbert A. Philbrick of Melrose, Mass. took the witness stand that afternoon, he was still a secret, dues-paying, in-good-standing member of the Massachusetts Communist Party. He was secure in its confidence and even a minor functionary in the underground apparatus.

The Switch. In a strong, confident voice, Witness Philbrick matter-of-factly explained something that he and the Government had hidden well. "During the entire nine years of my activities," he said, "I have been continuously in touch with the FBI." The Government had reversed, with spectacular success, the old Red tactic of infiltration.

As the wire-service reporters raced out of the courtroom for the telephones, the defendants and their lawyers sat stunned for a moment. Then the lawyers hopped to their feet in an attempt to head off the testimony of the unperturbed man in the witness chair.

"Unfair surprise," sputtered stooped, balding Abraham Isserman, and "Outside the scope of the indictment." Pint-sized Harry Sacher barked similar objections. Judge Harold Medina, bitingly suave, then and later gave short shrift to their objections.

What manner of man was this curly-haired, spectacled witness who looked more like a peaceful, carefully dressed clerk than a secret Government agent? For nine years he had led a double life. To his wife, blonde, blue-eyed Eva, Herb Philbrick was a good husband & father (they have four little daughters). To his employers, a Boston motion-picture theater chain, he was a go-getting assistant advertising manager, who knew how to turn out cute promotion pieces and ingratiate himself at newspaper drama desks. To his pastor, the Rev. Ralph Bertholf, he was a pillar of suburban Wakefield's First Baptist Church, a well-favored Sunday-school teacher and editor of the church's paper, Tall Spire. To everyone else, he was a friendly guy who looked much younger than his years, liked a drink now & then, foisted neither his religion nor his politics (whatever they were) on anybody.

The Line. In 1940, Witness Philbrick, who had been getting a flood of Communist-front literature in the course of his church work, helped to organize a group known as the Cambridge Youth Council. Almost at once, he spotted Reds in the fold. He took his suspicions to the FBI, was asked to stick with it and keep the FBI informed. Two years later, he was a member of the Young Communist League, from 1944 on a member of the Communist Party. The FBI paid his expenses: party dues, the cost of renting a recording machine on which he dictated some of his regular reports.

The significance of Herbert Philbrick's testimony was that it demonstrated--on the neighborhood level--what ex-Communist Budenz had demonstrated to be the operating procedure of upper echelons in the Communist Party. Philbrick learned the need for increasing secrecy as U.S. policy toward U.S. Reds became tougher: the churning underground groups were narrowed down to five members apiece; last names were out; there was to be no communication (for security reasons) with any Communist party member outside the unit.

Early in the game, Philbrick had learned the Marxist-Leninist definition of revolution. Fanny Hartman, the divorced wife of the onetime boss of the Massachusetts party, taught it: "Violent revolution to be carried out by bands of armed workers against the existing state government." When would it come? Not "next week or next month or 2 o'clock Wednesday afternoon" but during a "heavy depression" or a war, "in which case the conflict would be converted into civil war . . . The working class must shatter, break up and blow up the whole state machinery . . ." Meanwhile, party "activists" were to get jobs in key industries: the General Electric plant in Lynn, Mass., where jet engines are produced, textile plants, the Boston & Maine Railroad. This, in the party's circumlocutory "Aesopian" language, was known as "colonizing."

The Smear. The witness made one more startling disclosure before the Government turned him over to a defense that was scrabbling to get at him: one of the teachers at the secret schools for revolutionists was none other than Dirk Struik, professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, longtime sponsor of many organizations listed as subversive.

In Cambridge, Struik denied that he was a Communist, though he defined himself as a "Marxist scholar." He furiously labeled Philbrick a "stool pigeon." In the courtroom, the defense shrilly trumpeted "admitted FBI spy," and in the Communist press, the whole clanking machinery of vituperation was cranked into motion: the Daily Worker could find something revolting even in the fact that Philbrick was wearing a red, white & blue tie.

But such irrelevancies were just the point. The defense had nothing on Philbrick, and he gave no ground under the nagging cross-examination of bull-roaring, white-haired Louis McCabe, Said one Government official of Philbrick: "They're going to have a tough time smearing him. He's as clean as a whistle." There was also another disturbing fact for the defendants to consider: Communists anywhere in the U.S. could no longer be sure who among them was a Communist.

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